Author's note: Each story in this series is complete and separate, with no plot or characters in common with the others. Only one thin thread connects them.
Many thanks to whoredinarygirl for first editing and improving this story.
Immense gratitude to BeautifulStorm, the hardest working editor on this site, who not only used talent and expertise but also pointed the way to make the story's protagonists more human and sympathetic.
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Tish and Fallon didn't discover the switch until fifteen years later, but they were as angry as if it had been yesterday.
Though they didn't know each other while attending the same college, each woman had dated and broken up with both Darren and Manny. At the time, the men didn't stand out from the other immature, self-centered male students they knew.
Tish ran into Darren a few years after graduation. He was still attractive and funny, and she didn't think he had changed. When he asked her out, she decided to enjoy the evening before springing the surprise that was sure would send him screaming into the night.
She was caught off guard by his reaction after she told him that she was looking for someone to settle down and have kids with. He told her he was, too. A few months later, they realized they were looking for each other.
It was almost the same story with Manny and Fallon. He had a tougher time convincing her that he wasn't the same man she knew in college, but he wouldn't give up, and she finally gave in. The marriages thrived, and everyone was happy -- until the women found out about the switch.
Tish met Fallon when Darren was Manny's best man, but she didn't get to know her until Darren was transferred to the city where Fallon and Manny were living. They hit it off and were soon good friends.
The guys got together, the girls got together and the couples enjoyed doing things together. Darren and Manny talked about telling the girls about the switch a few times, but each time they agreed there was no upside, and the downside could be troublesome.
Were they ever right! When the girls found out, they were fuming.
The switch had its roots in high school. When Darren and Manny turned eighteen and began their fumbling forays into sex, both of them were already meticulous and organized. Each one wrote down everything that happened on his dates. They shared their notes and discussed what was working and what wasn't.
The value of the notes first occurred to them when Manny took out a girl that Darren had dated. One night, Darren dug out his old notes and made a copy of them for Manny, who devoured them. The notes covered everything they considered important about a girl -- not her personality, character, interests, hopes, dreams and passions. Who cared about that? Only one thing mattered: sex.
The notes were simple at first, but they gradually became more sophisticated and detailed about things like where the girls liked to be touched and where they didn't, what kind of talk turned them on and what turned them off, what kind of quirks they had, what drove them wild, and, most of all, how far the girls would go to satisfy their boyfriends, even when they didn't like doing something.
A girl whom Darren had dated never knew what hit her when she started dating Manny. When he began using the notes Darren had given him, she was enchanted. How could someone she just met say the things she loved to hear, touch her where she loved to be touched and put his tongue at the exact place that drove her wild? Yes, he wanted some things that she wasn't comfortable with, but at least they were things she had already done. It was the same when a girl first dated Manny and, later, Darren.
At State, Darren and Manny's note sharing evolved into a system. The college was large, and Darren and Manny kept track of their girls by department so their conquests would be less likely to know each other. They never double dated with each other and found a funny code word they could use to talk about their data.
"Spreadsheets," Darren said to Manny. "Get it?"
Before they moved on to the next girl, they had a complete spreadsheet on the girl they were finished with, including the best places to run across her, "by accident." Months later, Manny would "meet" the girls Darren had dated, and vice versa.
When the system was working, the hookups were almost instantaneous. The girls were swept off their feet by a guy who knew just how to please them, especially in bed. For a few weeks, the couples were hotter than a firecracker, until the girl began to know the real person. Sometimes she actually liked the real person enough to continue the relationship for a while, but usually it was over as fast as it had begun, which was fine with Manny and Darren.
What they came to call the "switch" grew from these college shenanigans. It happened when Darren spent six months abroad in France in his junior year. In his first week there, he met Fallon, who was in the same program, and they spent more of the six months in bed than studying. Darren's spreadsheet on Fallon was more extensive than his notes from the easy-pass classes he was taking.
He mentioned some of his adventures with Fallon to Manny, and Manny emailed Darren about Tish, whom he had met the week after Darren left. They had also clicked quickly, and they were going strong much longer than usual.
The switch occurred to them at the same time because their emails crossed within minutes of each other. They both pointed out that Tish was in creative writing, and Fallon was in business, so they would probably never meet. Wouldn't it be wild if they could switch girls when Darren came home?
Later emails went from imagining it to discussing how it could be done to deciding to do it to implementing the plan.
Neither girl had a clue as to why Darren and Manny broke up with them the week before Darren came home. If they were upset at all, they got over it quickly, because their new boyfriends knew exactly what to do to make each of them forget the breakup. It was like magic.
Manny and Darren had a blast. They tried some new things. For instance, they had collected so much data that they knew exactly what the girls really hated as well as what they loved. One night, they both created dates from hell. Separately, they drove Tish and Fallon to tears with things they said and did. The cruel game didn't last more than fifteen minutes, because they found that they didn't enjoy tormenting the girls.
Manipulating them was a different story. They played Tish and Fallon like puppets and reaped the sexual dividends. Even so, variety called, and before the year was over, each couple had broken up, and the boys had moved on to other spreadsheets.
By the time Manny met Tish again, the spreadsheets had been forgotten. But one night after Manny took Tish home, he remembered them, and he drove back to his apartment like a maniac. When he went to his computer, he breathed a sigh of relief when he saw the spreadsheets were still there.
He opened up Tish's and began studying it. In a couple of days, he had memorized it. He already knew he wanted to spend the rest of his life with her, and he decided all was fair to make that happen.
When he told her about this much later, she cried, kissed him passionately and said, "That's so romantic. Why didn't you tell me then? I would have forgiven the switch right away."
Manny told Darren what he had done, and when Darren fell in love with Fallon, he used the spreadsheets, too.
One day, when the girls were having lunch, they were both in silly, exhilarated moods. It turned out they had both scorched the sheets with their husbands the night before. This led to a discussion about good sex and about how their husbands were such good lovers. And that led to them reminiscing that they had always been that way, even in college.
After a while, both girls looked at each other and blurted out almost in unison, "This is so weird."
The stories they were telling each other were almost duplicates. Each of them had been amazed by her husband's intuition about what she enjoyed in bed. Both of them heard the same two words coming out of each other's mouths several times: "like magic."
As they continued in this vein, Fallon said, "I just remembered. I met Manny right after I broke up with Darren. As soon as I met Manny, I forgot all about Darren because Manny was so -- wait a minute!"
She giggled.
"Tish, do you remember when you broke up with Manny?" she asked. "No, wait, don't tell me. I'll tell you the exact month and year."
When she gave Tish the date, Tish thought for a while. A look of amazement came over her face.
"How in the world?"
"Don't you see?" Fallon said. "When I met Darren in Spain, he must have told Manny about me. You must have met Manny around the same time, and Manny told Darren about you.
"Let me take another guess. Manny twisted things around to make it seem like you were dumping him. And then you met Darren, totally by accident, a week after he came back from Spain, and he wasn't even in your department. Do you remember? I know it was a long time ago."
"I think you're right."
"I'm certain. It was like magic how each of them knew exactly how to get into our pants. I see the light bulb going on in your mind."
